Celebrity

Recently, Harumi and some of her colleagues adapted the party game Celebrity for the classroom. The game involves correctly identifying famous persons or events and so lends itself to test review.

To prepare, students were divided into two teams, given two different term sheets and asked to prepare definitions of various persons, events or concepts.
Some of the terms included HMS Beagle, Australopithecus and differential reproductive success.

In class the next day, the two teams listened to each others' definitions while taking notes. Teachers and classmates weighed in, asking questions, correcting misconceptions and fine-tuning definitions. Students took these refined definitions home to study for class the next day. The idea was to be prepared to describe and identify each term correctly.

Celebrity works like this: students randomly draw terms out of hat and try to offer descriptions which their classmates will recognize. In the first round, each player can describe the person, term or concept at some length; during the second, the description is sharply limited to a two-word phrase-- a distillation of the earlier, long-winded explanation. The team or person to guess the most terms correctly wins.

Not surprisingly, preparation is key; the better students know each term, the more imaginative their descriptions can be--and the sharper their classmates' guesses. However, the game angle has the advantage of being student-centered, competitive and often quite hilarious. It makes memorization a means to an end instead of an end in itself--and yet the students come away knowing quite a lot more about Darwinism.